sup acquires LiveJournal

I was in Moscow last week, at the invitation of my friend and ex-colleague Ben Wegg-Prosser. Ben now works for Russian web firm SUP, and the big news for them is that they've just acquired LiveJournal.

I'm not going to say anything about the details of the deal, because I don't know them, but I thought it would be worthwhile pointing something out - SUP already owns the licence to operate LiveJournal in Russia, has been doing so for almost two years, and LiveJournal is huge in Russia. It really is an established media platform. Most of the leading journalists, particularly the independent ones, are bloggers on LiveJournal, and the biggest ones of have tens of thousands of daily readers. Sup have leveraged this content into a news site, which uses the top posts as its content source. The fact that LiveJournal is independent of state control (genuinely independent, as far as I could tell) is obviously what makes this attractive to Russians, particularly at a time when the Russian state seems to be playing fast and loose with democratic process and a free press. It seemed interesting to me that, while we debate the details of blogging and journalism and the like, LiveJournal's very nature as a blogging platform is what makes it plausible as a journalism platform. Looked at through the lens of state control, the blogosphere becomes the true journalistic endeavour.

SUP is backed financially by one of Russia's leading oligarchs, Alexander Mamut, which is certain to create anxiety within LiveJournal's userbase. I don't know anything about the guy, but I will say this: from what I saw Sup is a well-run, well-resourced and very Western-looking outfit. Its offices look like the offices of a particularly cool Western Web firm, full of smart, bright people with the right instincts. As well as operating LiveJournal in Russia, they also run a leading sports site (championat.ru) and sell ads to Russian IPs for Yahoo!, last.fm, the Times and the Guardian.

I also met Anton Nossik, Russia's leading blogger and a LiveJournal user. In the three bars we visited, he seemed to know everybody and everybody knew him. He didn't have a bad word to say about SUP, or LiveJournal. He had a few harsh words to say about other Russian media, needless to say, and seemed to value his independence fiercely and uncompromisingly. In Russia, LiveJournal equals independence, it seems. Which seems to be the exact opposite of what many said would happen when Sup acquired the LiveJournal licence in Russia in 2006.

So, this post is not an advert for LiveJournal or a means of advocating the deal. All I'll say is SUP seems a well-run outfit on Western lines (ie, it's there to make money, not to peddle influence) and LiveJournal continues to be a massively important independent media platform in Russia, which should in itself give some pause to those who are already criticising the deal.